150th Anniversary: 1851-2001; The Assignment Is to Get the Story, but the Image Can Rise to Art

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Published: November 14, 2001

ON the days just after, we paused, many of us, to look at the photographs of the events that had seemed to rush by on the streets and on our televisions. We woke up, hoping it wasn't true, to check with the newspapers whose still images of the smoking towers and fleeing people confirmed what had happened. They gave us a chance, which we reluctantly needed, to grasp the unimaginable by stopping time, as still images do. Instead of the same endless video loop of jets going into the World Trade Center towers that we had watched on Sept. 11, until it had almost become a blur, we saw details:

We saw the tiny figure of a man standing on the edge of a gaping hole that looked like a broken-tooth grimace, where the first plane had just crashed into the north tower, an inferno behind him, nowhere to go, one arm raised. (To shade his eyes? To signal for help?) We saw the photograph by Shannon Stapleton, of Reuters, of five dust-covered rescue workers carrying out the Rev. Mychal F. Judge, a Fire Department chaplain, who had just died in a rain of debris while ministering to victims when the towers collapsed, a modern-day Pietà. And we saw the photograph by Richard Drew of The Associated Press, maybe the most excruciating and indelible of all the images that ran in The Times, of a man tumbling headfirst from the north tower.

We saw these photographs, and since then, even against our will, we have not been able to forget them. They may or may not be the most horrific images of any atrocities we have seen, but they can seem as if they are the most horrific at this moment because these are our buildings and our streets and our families and our lives. In their immediate aftermath, it is impossible to imagine the photographs' ever fading from anybody's memory or losing their national symbolism.

Beauty, Perhaps, but Rarely Art

The magnitude of that event enhanced the urgency of the photographs, but it did not automatically raise their status. In photojournalism the balance isn't easily tipped from the utilitarian picture, which delivers information quickly, efficiently, even deeply affectingly, to a work of art, which delivers more than information. It is rarely just a question of the scale of the recorded subject or the intention of the photographer. All photojournalists hope their best pictures are good enough to be considered art, but most of the time they don't succeed. They can't.

The task of conveying news, an honorable and complicated job, generally relegates the picture, like the event it records, to ephemera. The picture may be complete and even beautiful in its way. It may go so far as to shape history and therefore endure, like Eddie Adams's unforgettable photograph of the South Vietnamese police commander shooting a Vietcong prisoner. But the picture does not transcend its event, which is where the art comes in.

This transcendence entails a novel composition, an expression, the echo of some previous images we have seen, maybe in museums or books, which are stored in our memories as archetypes and symbols, so that the photograph, by conscious or unconscious association and special variation, is elevated from the specific to the universal.

Often this is just a fluke of fate, a result of an accident, serendipity. Or rather it is the serendipity of good photographers who by nature seem to have the uncanny instinct to be in the right spot at the right moment.

It wasn't many years ago that readers scanning photographs in The New York Times over breakfast could expect a lean diet of single-column black-and-white head shots accompanying the news. The Gray Lady was gray back then, and it wasn't just that she hadn't made the leap yet to color (almost a century after color photography's invention, but who's counting).

Now, the world having rapidly changed, this newspaper, like most newspapers, has gradually changed with it. In the age of the Internet and television, papers including The Times have had to think differently. The reading public is more accustomed to looking at pictures, which doesn't just mean that it is more comfortable getting information from them. It means that people are smarter about how pictures work: the belief that facts were whatever appeared through a viewfinder seems quaint in our digital age. So a more visually shrewd populace expects a more visually sophisticated menu of the day's events over its coffee and toast.

This proliferation of competing images and the acuteness of public attention to visual culture permit fresh latitudes (within the bounds of truth). Look at the front page of Aug. 3, 2001, the 51,834th number of The Times, an average day before Sept. 11, and you will see two photographs. One, above the fold, is a fairly straightforward spot-news shot of Radislav Krstic, a Bosnian Serb general, on crutches, in The Hague, where he was found guilty of genocide. Below is a picture by Ruth Fremson of The Times, apropos of nothing much except summertime: it shows a boy, arms out, face heavenward, standing before a wall of electric fans that belong to an artwork at the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens.